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I have a few year old Volkswagen. I'm security conscious and made sure to disable all the data collection I could find in the companion app, turn off remote acc

I have a few year old Volkswagen. I'm security conscious and made sure to disable all the data collection I could find in the companion app, turn off remote access services, dig through the infotainment to turn off what I could, etc. Last year I requested a Carfax on it, and one of the fields in the request was current mileage. I entered an estimate like 75000 miles. On form submission, that field failed validation with the red subtext along the lines of 'this is less than the last reported mileage of 75345, reported <5 or so days prior>'. Checking my odometer and looking at my past few days' trips, that was indeed accurate. The car hadn't been to a shop or out of my possession in weeks, so I can only assume the telemetry was still dialing home and selling to third parties despite my best efforts to disable it. Anecdotal and not unexpected in the grand scheme, but it still surprised me.

is_true 5mo ago
I think reporting mileage would be one of the only usages for data collection that is ok with me. In some countries there's a SCAM in which the owner or agency lowers the mileage of the car and sell it for much more because of the lower mileage.
- cwillu 5mo ago
  It's hard to take any piece of text seriously when it contains all-caps'd emotionally charged words seemingly just to make sure we notice that they're there.
  - is_true 5mo ago
    SORRY
- SoftTalker 5mo ago
  This is harder on modern cars. Mechanical odometers were fairly easy to roll back, modern digital odometers are quite well protected.
  - is_true 5mo ago
    They aren't. Even for brands like BMW, Mercedes, etc.
futureshock 5mo ago
I think this is interesting because it collides my intuition from the pre-adtech world with the post. Surely collecting telemetry on nearly every mile you drive could never be a sensible use of time or money, right? What kind of insanity is that? But then of course I know that every click on every website is recorded for all time and that data must be many thousands of times less valuable.
- noir_lord 5mo ago
  Worked in enterprise for most of my career, uniformly the business side asks for every single piece of data possible to be collected and kept in case they need it. They basically never need 95% of it and most of it is never looked at again. That 5% that does gets used ends up been collapsed to a single 100,000ft view somewhere that the decision makers in the company can see it and immediately treat as gospel. Which is fun when you are the new hire, get asked to look at that dashboard and it turns out it's not calculating the totals correctly at all. Then you have all the people in that business who collate reports for more senior report readers who never look at them but still collate them and those more senior report readers never pass it up anyway. Enterprise is a serious weird kafakaesque place at times, it helps to just ignore the weirdness since you can't change it.
  - red-iron-pine 5mo ago
    if it doesn't impact the stock price, does it matter?
    - noir_lord 5mo ago
      Does if it’s a private held company or contributes to profitability in either case. Doesn’t matter to me in the slightest, a company can have all the inefficiency it can afford as long as I get paid and treat reasonably well it is not my concern how they allocate resources.
  - GJim 5mo ago
    > uniformly the business side asks for every single piece of data possible to be collected and kept in case they need it. True, though collecting and keeping unnecessary _personal_ data is very much a liability under the GDPR.
vachina 5mo ago
System working as intended
pantalaimon 5mo ago
I mean there was this CCC [0] talk two years ago where they managed to get access to the poorly secured location data of all the cars, including historic movement patterns. [0] https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-wir-wissen-wo-dein-auto-steht-volksdaten-von-volkswagen https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-wir-wissen-wo-dein-auto-steht-vo...
Klonoar 5mo ago
You should define “few years old”. One trick is to buy a car from the end of the 3G era, because at least in America those networks don’t even operate anymore. Car is nerfed in terms of phoning home without you having to do much at all.

is_true 5mo ago

I think reporting mileage would be one of the only usages for data collection that is ok with me. In some countries there's a SCAM in which the owner or agency lowers the mileage of the car and sell it for much more because of the lower mileage.

cwillu 5mo ago
It's hard to take any piece of text seriously when it contains all-caps'd emotionally charged words seemingly just to make sure we notice that they're there.
- is_true 5mo ago
  SORRY
SoftTalker 5mo ago
This is harder on modern cars. Mechanical odometers were fairly easy to roll back, modern digital odometers are quite well protected.
- is_true 5mo ago
  They aren't. Even for brands like BMW, Mercedes, etc.

futureshock 5mo ago

I think this is interesting because it collides my intuition from the pre-adtech world with the post. Surely collecting telemetry on nearly every mile you drive could never be a sensible use of time or money, right? What kind of insanity is that? But then of course I know that every click on every website is recorded for all time and that data must be many thousands of times less valuable.

noir_lord 5mo ago
Worked in enterprise for most of my career, uniformly the business side asks for every single piece of data possible to be collected and kept in case they need it. They basically never need 95% of it and most of it is never looked at again. That 5% that does gets used ends up been collapsed to a single 100,000ft view somewhere that the decision makers in the company can see it and immediately treat as gospel. Which is fun when you are the new hire, get asked to look at that dashboard and it turns out it's not calculating the totals correctly at all. Then you have all the people in that business who collate reports for more senior report readers who never look at them but still collate them and those more senior report readers never pass it up anyway. Enterprise is a serious weird kafakaesque place at times, it helps to just ignore the weirdness since you can't change it.
- red-iron-pine 5mo ago
  if it doesn't impact the stock price, does it matter?
  - noir_lord 5mo ago
    Does if it’s a private held company or contributes to profitability in either case. Doesn’t matter to me in the slightest, a company can have all the inefficiency it can afford as long as I get paid and treat reasonably well it is not my concern how they allocate resources.
- GJim 5mo ago
  > uniformly the business side asks for every single piece of data possible to be collected and kept in case they need it. True, though collecting and keeping unnecessary _personal_ data is very much a liability under the GDPR.

vachina 5mo ago

System working as intended

pantalaimon 5mo ago

I mean there was this CCC [0] talk two years ago where they managed to get access to the poorly secured location data of all the cars, including historic movement patterns. [0] https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-wir-wissen-wo-dein-auto-steht-volksdaten-von-volkswagen https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-wir-wissen-wo-dein-auto-steht-vo...

Klonoar 5mo ago

You should define “few years old”. One trick is to buy a car from the end of the 3G era, because at least in America those networks don’t even operate anymore. Car is nerfed in terms of phoning home without you having to do much at all.